Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Perpetual Beta

This brave new techno world will have changed again by the time I finish this sentence.

Most of the time I feel fortunate to live in "interesting times," as the saying goes. It's nice to keep in touch with old friends and relatives through Facebook. It's cool to go on YouTube and find clips of everything from vintage 60s rock to Richard Feynman. It's good to have Wikipedia, Babelfish translators, breaking news and gossip right there at my fingertips.

The rest of the time I feel like I'm trapped in an ADD Arcade - dodging buzz-words flung at me from all directions and trying to keep up with jump cuts and hypertext and multiple streams and formats of information. A bit overwhelming. My biggest problem is that there is a lot going on in any one page of data and I am too easily distracted. It took me 2 hours to pick the YouTube clips for the above paragraph.

I suppose the key is to keep an open mind and go at my own pace. We should all become familiar with these worlds - because our patrons are. Even if our own system is a little bit behind the curve in terms of technology.